My first experience of May 1st (Erste Mai) celebrations was as a student in Berlin in 2002 drinking beer in a park Kreuzberg. I don’t much like beer – not then and not now – but that was what everyone else was drinking and it felt like the right thing to do. Along the streets around us much drunker people became increasingly rowdy. When some of them started throwing bottles my friends and I meandered our way back on bikes to Prenzlauerberg and sought out a bar to continue our own revelry long into the night. 

Based on this day in Berlin sixteen years ago, and posters for all night parties and eyebrow-raising Berlin news reports more recently, my assumption was always that the Tag der Arbeit, as Erste Mai is widely known, was the same riotous affair across all of Germany. This year we decided to take advantage of the Erste Mai long weekend to visit my parents-in-law in my husband’s home town, just south east of Frankfurt. Strolling through the centre of this historic little town yesterday, we stopped to watch the local preparations to see in the May – a scene which suggested something quite different.

In the middle of the town marketplace, surrounded by beautifully-maintained Fachwerkhäuser,  roughly ten men either in dusty work clothes or paint-flecked traditional journeymen’s black waistcoated suits, were mingling around a large truck. Beside them stood a huge stripped log, reaching up into the sky. At the very top of the log hung a wreath and down the sides it was decorated with carved figures of men doing handiwork – stonemasons, blacksmiths, carpenters, plasterers, tilers and the like. The atmosphere was convivial, as they and their families helped themselves to beer and Flammkuchen and watched two of the men fit in the last few paving stones around the base of the tree.

This, my father-in-law explained to me, was the Handwerkerbaum (Craftsmen Tree), donated to town for the May 1st celebrations by the local craftsmen. The Handwerkerbaum appears to be a combination of two traditions: a version of the Tag der Arbeit and the older tradition of the Maibaum, which is put up in many parts of Europe to celebrate the arrival of Spring and the coming of summer.

Some sources – without much concrete evidence – say that the Maibaum stems from German pagan rituals honouring forest gods. Others locate the Maibaum in the Christian Pfingstbaum (Pentecost Tree) tradition, cited in historical records from France across Germany to Italy. It is thought that Maibaums were forbidden for a while in the Middle Ages because of their pagan associations. Despite this and whatever the origins, the tradition was not entirely lost. Throughout the twentieth century the Maibaum in a variety of forms has been a firm part of village life in many parts of Germany, erected either for the Maifest celebrations or for Pfingsten.

As a seven-year-old in East Yorkshire, England, I was taught how to dance around a beribboned maypole. We learnt this at school without realising what we were doing was yet another manifestation of this longstanding European tradition. And it is these twists and flavours of a single cultural event, reaching across a continent, which interest me as an expat.

It seems to me that if you take a local tradition’s current expression and start to unravel it, you find a reflection of that area’s cultural, political and religious history. Such traditions communicate what would have been important in the past and what is important now. In Berlin and Hamburg, there is the strong identification with the ordinary worker, reinforced by a well-represented political left, and combined with the general inclination to throw a wild all-night party. In suburban Hessen, the event seems to be more about celebrating the contributions of skilled craftsmen to the local community and a family-focused coming together. In Bavaria, so I am told, the event has a more obviously Catholic emphasis. But wherever you are in Germany and however far back in history you look, a fun day off and plenty of beer are definitely consistent the overarching themes. Happy joining in fellow expats. 

Chloë